


to rage against the dying light

by Contra



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-19 06:12:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13117722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Contra/pseuds/Contra
Summary: They have both always felt it in the back of their minds, a burning mix of truth and hunger. // Or: The Force is life in love with itself.





	to rage against the dying light

**Author's Note:**

> The title is inspired by the poem "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas.
> 
> This is my first fic for this fandom so pardon me if I get details wrong. Also, I only watched the movies so this is based on them.
> 
> Suicide is mentioned in this. It's not hat graphic but if that's a topic that triggers you, please dont read!

The first time Poe watches a star die, he is twenty and scared and flying one of his first missions for the resistance. He’s using the gravitational pull of the emerging black hole to escape the First Order, but it’s screwing with the machinery so bad he’s basically flying blind.

The star is still a semi-safe distance away, as close as he dares and maybe just a little bit closer. If he has to choose between death by gravitational force or capture by the First Order, Poe will take the singularity every single time.

The First Order starship hesitates to follow him into the debris field, its higher mass won’t allow it to pursue the X-Wing without being sucked into the star. The TIE fighters aren’t much use either, as the mess of radiation will make communication impossible. For a few seconds, Poe can watch the Star Destroyer hover behind him like a severely misplaced steam iron, until the bridge seems to come to the same conclusion as him and the ship vanishes into Hyperspace.

Relief explodes in Poe’s chest like fireworks, flowers, and the impulse of life shoots through him bright and sharp.  His eyes fall on the natural spectacle that’s happening just miles away. He can’t help but stare, even though his eyes hurt with the unbelievability and beauty of it, the impossible wonder of an event horizon. It’s like he can feel how time stretches towards it, along with every single atom in his body.

This is years before he meets Finn and yet-

 

The first time Finn watches a person die, he wants to scream and scream and scream.

 

Of course Poe knows all the old stories. Jedi, Sith, Lightsabers. The Force. He tries it as a child, but no matter how hard he concentrates, he never manages to lift up the pebble in his hand. The most frustrating thing is, he is _so_ close. There is something, he can feel it, something that is just at the back of his mind, but nothing ever happens, despite all his struggles.

 

Finn makes a decision that day, he is seven years old. That decision is to never let anyone kill him.

 

The Force doesn’t work that way, one of the older resistance fighters tells Poe. She’s gotten to know this particular rage so well over the years, her voice is calm and hard with sorrow.

It has to, Poe screams, the words almost breaking in his throat, he’s only eight, she has to. She has to come back.

But instead, they find his mother’s X-Wing three days later and they don’t tell him what they found in the wreckage, just that they’re so sorry and it’s not enough. Death could touch her, he thinks, hysterical with pain and loneliness. Death could touch _me_ and just leave like nothing even happened.

 

Finn tries. He tries to be good a Stormtrooper because that’s how you get not-killed and he’s still somehow relieved when he gets assigned to Sanitation. Command makes them all watch the destruction of the Death Star so they’ll hate the rebel-resistance, they make them watch the destruction of Alderaan to make them feel… safe? Strong maybe, being a Stormtrooper is all about strength, but Finn feels neither. He thinks about the Sanitation workers in both of these places and all he feels is numb. He tries not to think about Stormtroopers.

 

The grief Poe feels is jagged-edged and blurry, almost eats him up from the inside, one torn-out piece of mind at a time. He can’t fly for months; the whole sky is a memory. He turns nine and Mom isn’t there and that night, he lies in his bed and tries to feel nothing but doesn’t. There is still that something in the back of his head, warm and low and bright and humming, a will to live. A calling.

He climbs out of his bed and into an X-Wing that he steals out of the hangar. His hands are too small for steering correctly and he has to make do, shivering with overwhelmed exhaustion. I’ll find you, mom, he thinks, I’m coming for you, tries to remember the coordinates of where she went missing but suddenly it’s like she is beside him instead, murmuring out soothing advice and explanations just like she always did. He flies circles and circles, tears streaming down his face, and the bright thing in his head somehow gets louder. You are not alone, it says, look, all this life, all this sky. He didn’t have a concept of heaven before, but that night he finds one.

He gets into a lot of trouble the next day and then the pilots’ academy.

 

Finn is twelve when he sees a Trooper he doesn’t know walk off the main deck without any sort of protective gear. There is the short, shocked silence of people too well-trained to scream and then a terrible, audible splatter.

The incident is never mentioned again.

 

Poe at twenty-four loves like all resistance fighters, fierce and quick and shallow. There are girls, of course, and boys, but it’s about sex more than anything else. Our souls are immortal, a girl with a strange amulet tells him as he buys her a drink, we need to be careful who we give them to, but he’s not looking for that kind of thing.

Oh yeah, our souls are immortal, Poe says, still smiling. It’s our bodies I worry about.

 

Finn keeps thinking about that main deck, and falling. Sometimes, when he’s cleaning up there, he’ll step up to the edge and look. It’s a long way, he always thinks, a very long way down. It burns into his retinas. He only need to close his eyes at night, at mealtime, and there it is.

He never goes through with it, though. There’s something holding him back, a low and constant humming in the back of his head, it feels warm and almost hopeful. At least you have this choice, it tells him. If you really jump, you won’t have that choice anymore.

 

Poe is past thirty and there’s still the thing in his head, but it’s like fire now. It burns him up inside. He's watched more people die than live over the last years. Save as many as you can, the thing tells him. But they keep getting shot down next to him or bleeding to death in his arms.

Just please, he keeps begging. Let me save someone. One life more.

 

I’ll do it when they try to make me kill someone, Finn thinks, which seems safe enough as a Sanitation worker. I’d jump before I do that.

But then the call comes and he’s in a group with all the others and there is a brief moment, when they’re marching over the main deck, he’d have to run but might make it with the element of surprise, but he-

just can’t do it.

The thing in his head surges up like a flame, an endless, bottomless hunger. I want to live, it screams, I don’t want to die, and then the moment is over and he’s in the transporter with all the other Stormtroopers.

On Jakku, he doesn’t shoot.

 

And then Finn and Poe meet and it’s nothing like black holes and nothing like jumping, though it does have elements of both. It’s calm and warm and soft and hopeful and it’s also fierce and sharp and loud and bright.

It’s explosions in a vacuum and the feeling you get when the X-Wing loses ground contact and closing your eyes and still seeing pictures.

It’s something completely, uniquely, bravely their own.

 

I’ve never seen a sky so blue, Finn says. They’re sitting outside of a hangar that the resistance is fixing up again, the few people that are left of it. Poe just came back from a mission and he’s still sweaty and smelling like fuel and grease. Finn doesn’t mind.

Really? Poe asks, because he has, of course, seen every possible shade and he sometimes forgets that infinity for Finn has been always dark.

Finn nods, smiling. It’s a wonderful color, he says. I wonder where it comes from.

You don’t know? Poe is surprised, but Finn just shrugs. Stormtroopers aren’t taught this kind of stuff.

Of course, Poe laughs and starts to explain the Raleigh Scattering and wavelengths and particles. He uses his hands to demonstrate the angles, he used them to shoot down Stormtroopers a few hours earlier and a few hours later, Finn will hold them while falling asleep.

 

And all that time, the sky is blue.

 

That night, they’re on some desolate rebel base on a backwater planet that’s barely big enough to qualify as such, in the middle of a universe-wide war and Finn will sleep without dreaming of falling. Death can touch us, Poe thinks, death can still touch us.

But not right now.

**Author's Note:**

> Please tell me what you think!


End file.
